Hello, on Sunday 28 September 2014 at 17:58, Stephan Beal wrote: > - Wiki syntaxes have always been a matter of personal taste, and there are > no less than 100 different ones out there in use. To anyone who believes > they can convince people to switch to a "common" dialect... i've got a > bridge in Brooklyn i'd like to sell them. > > i.e. i don't see CommonMark being more than yet another attempt to create a > "perfect world," and history strongly suggests that they will be fighting > an up-hill battle for a while before it ultimately runs out of steams and > becomes simply yet another wiki markup platform. > > i could very well be wrong (as i so _sorely_ was about tablets only 3 or 4 > years ago, and 19 years ago with regards to the downfall of Unix), but the > term "wiki format standardization" is almost an oxymoron, and i don't > foresee CommonMark breaking that pattern.
I completely share the opinion above, except I'm afraid you have misunderstood the goal of CommonMark: it's not about unifying or standardizing wiki format, only unifying Markdown. The root problem was not the plethora of wiki formats, or the even larger plethora of lightweight markup languages; it was only the ambiguities in the original Markdown specification. There are almost two dozen independent implementations of something called Markdown, and yet each of them implement a language that is subtly different from all the others. A tower-of-Babel effect. You could argue that yet-another variant of Markdown that is subtly different from all the others would only add to the problem (see http://xkcd.com/927/ ), and you might very well be right. The only hopes it won't do more are than good (with regards to fragmentation and ambiguity of the label "Markdown") come from that the only variant that is perfectly well-defined, without any ambiguous construct, with a complete test-suite, and that big-website using Markdown will go for CommonMark (Stack Exchange, GitHub and Reddit). But this is still about disambiguating "Markdown", without looking at any other wiki or markup format. Natacha
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